Catherine Legg
After training in analytic philosophy, I became fascinated by American pragmatism, particularly the thought of Charles Peirce. I completed a PhD at Australian National University on Peirce's three philosophical categories, entitled "Modes of Being". My thesis presented an extended argument against Quine's famous 'mid-century' dictum: "to be is the value of a bound variable..." (in our best scientific theory), as the template for a realist ontology. I argued that that we should be realist about not only particular existent objects (what Peirce referred to as 'Secondness'), but also universals ('Thirdness') and real chance and possibility ('Firstness').
Since then, I've brought Peirce's ideas into mainstream philosophy debates concerning realism and truth, modal epistemology and the grounds of logical normativity. More recently, I've been working on perception and cognition, where I've engaged with both Pittsburgh School philosophy and recent work in embodied cognition. Since 2019, I've served as editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Pragmatism".
I have long-standing secondary research interests in formal ontology and knowledge representation, having briefly worked in artificial intelligence research as an ‘applied ontologist’. I've also recently begun publishing in philosophy of education, where Peircean ideas such as active learning and the 'community of inquiry' find much resonance.
Address: Philosophy Program
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University
221 Burwood Hwy
Burwood 3125
AUSTRALIA
Since then, I've brought Peirce's ideas into mainstream philosophy debates concerning realism and truth, modal epistemology and the grounds of logical normativity. More recently, I've been working on perception and cognition, where I've engaged with both Pittsburgh School philosophy and recent work in embodied cognition. Since 2019, I've served as editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry "Pragmatism".
I have long-standing secondary research interests in formal ontology and knowledge representation, having briefly worked in artificial intelligence research as an ‘applied ontologist’. I've also recently begun publishing in philosophy of education, where Peircean ideas such as active learning and the 'community of inquiry' find much resonance.
Address: Philosophy Program
Faculty of Arts and Education
Deakin University
221 Burwood Hwy
Burwood 3125
AUSTRALIA
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Philosophy by Catherine Legg
(paper is forthcoming in Synthese)
paramount and put in the indicative mode, Peirce famously advised us to clarify the meaning of our terms using “would-be’s”, not “will-be’s”. Peirce thought deeply about necessity in all its aspects, and this is one of the
areas of his work with as yet untapped insights.
(paper is forthcoming in Synthese)
paramount and put in the indicative mode, Peirce famously advised us to clarify the meaning of our terms using “would-be’s”, not “will-be’s”. Peirce thought deeply about necessity in all its aspects, and this is one of the
areas of his work with as yet untapped insights.
Ludwig Wittgenstein famously remarked, “The results of philosophy are the uncovering of...bumps that the understanding has got by running its head up against the limits of language”. This idea of the limits of language is given stunning expression by Jonathan Lear in Radical Hope, in his discussion of colonization as the outer existential boundary of a ‘form of life’, through his self-described “ontological” reading of a quote by Crow chief Plenty Coups: “After this...nothing happened”. Here, Lear appears to conjure an infinite sadness of cultural apocalypse – and white guilt – whereby “insofar as I am a Crow subject, I have ceased to be”. In search of an indigenous perspective to put alongside Lear’s account, I discovered that Tyson Yunkaporta’s recent book Sand Talk takes a more matter of fact – even cheerful – approach to apocalypse. In so doing, I argue, it presents a fresh understanding of the limits of language which has surprising resonance with the Philosophical Investigations.
Here I explore the nature of the fusing process itself, which corresponds to Peirce’s third sign-type: the symbol. I show how symbols – that is, concepts – consist in nothing more than habits of associating certain icons (in Kantian terms: schemata) with certain real-world indices or ‘cues’. As the icons are repeatedly used in specific contexts, and embedded in the human lifeworld, they transform from pictures to predicates. This offers a Peircean solution to the Hard Problem of Content, and shows that all meaning must be understood diachronically.
These are slides presented at the Skill and Knowledge Conference, University of Wollongong, Feb 15-16, 2022.
The presentation argues that although pragmatist philosophers such as Rorty have had great success in contending that there is no 'criterion of truth', inferences from this claim to the conclusion that we lack any useful notion of truth have been too hasty. "Recent world events" arguably show that truth as an overarching philosophical notion was always more fragile than philosophers imagined it to be. How humanity is to ride out arguably necessary 'epistemic trust-busting' (Steven Fuller's term) in institutions of higher learning, whilst maintaining sufficient workable human trust in science to keep body and soul together, is suggested as a key question of our age, to which an 'epistemology as praxis' is offered as one modest solution.
This presentation seeks to contribute to answering, "How, in these times, can we get to post-post-truth?"
ABSTRACT: Enactivism has greatly benefitted contemporary philosophy by demonstrating that the traditional intellectualist ‘act-content’ model of intentionality is simply insufficient, and showing how minds may be built from world-involving bodily habits. Many enactivists have assumed that this must entail non-representationalism concerning at least basic minds. Here I argue that such anti-intellectualism is overly constraining, and not necessary. I sketch an alternative enactivism which draws on Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics, and understands signs as habits whose connections with rich schemas of possible experience render them subject to increasing degrees of self-control. The talk’s key innovation is to align this cyclical process of habit cultivation with Peirce’s representationalist icon-index-symbol distinction, in a manner which I explain.
The presentation is also viewable on YouTube: https://youtu.be/jrW4AsV5kCQ
The talk was delivered to a roundtable at Deakin University in August 2020.
This is joint work with Joshua Black (University of Canterbury, NZ). It is now published as Legg, C. and Black, J. (2020). “What is Intelligence For? A Peircean Pragmatist Response to the Knowing-How, Knowing-That Debate.” Erkenntnis. (See 'Philosophy' section for an author copy.)
Presented at the Conference of the Australian Hegel Society: "Naturalism and Sociality", University of NSW, 14-15 February 2019.
This presentation was delivered at Deakin University in November 2018, at a day-long workshop on pragmatism, phenomenology and the Pittsburgh School.
The presentation compares and contrasts distinctions between 'two truths' in: i) Wilfrid Sellars' philosophy, ii) Buddhist thought as presented by Garfield in his book, "Engaging Buddhism: Why it Matters to Philosophy" (Oxford 2014).
This talk brings together contemporary analytic discussions of truthmaker realism with recent work by Frederik Stjernfelt (Natural Propositions, 2015) on the structure and function of the proposition as 'icon fused to index', drawing on Charles Peirce's theory of signs.
It draws on Charles Peirce's semiotics to reconceive ‘objectivity’ in a more open-minded and fallibilist manner, based around a logical rather than scientific notion of ‘object’, by means of an indexical normative pragmatics. At this point, naturalism's key question becomes – is what you're talking about merely a reflection of your own idiosyncracies? Or does it have a "nature"?...
As this presentation is as yet unpublished, comments are very welcome. (c.legg@deakin.edu.au)
2. Idea-based Epistemology and its Conception of Truth
3. Habit-based Epistemology and its Conception of Truth
4. Peirce’s Ethics
5. Analytic Explication vs Pragmatic Elucidation
6. Developing the Ideal of Truth
A written-up version exists - if you'd like a copy, please email me (c.legg@deakin.edu.au)
It has now been published in Cuadernos de Sistemática Peirceana (Volume 7). For a copy, see under 'Philosophy (Papers)'
development is divided into three distinct stages, which might be summarized very roughly as knowledge of: i) Objects, ii) Concepts applied to Objects and iii) Concepts alone.
As well as presenting a precis of the special issue’s three author papers and two previously unpublished pieces by Joe, this introduction outlines some of Joe’s achievements, and pays tribute to his on-list philosophical voice, which had a distinctive depth, acerbic commentary and wide-ranging creative fire.
Neopragmatism has been accused of having ‘an experience problem’. This paper begins by outlining Hume's understanding of perception according to which ideas are copies of impressions thought to constitute a direct confrontation with reality. This understanding is contrasted with Peirce's theory of perception according to which percepts give rise to perceptual judgments which do not copy but index the percept (just as a weather-cock indicates the direction of the wind). Percept and perceptual judgment thereby mutually inform and correct one another, as the perceiver develops mental habits of interpreting their surroundings, so that, in this theory of perception, as Peirce puts it: “[n]othing at all…is absolutely confrontitional”. Paul Redding has argued that Hegel’s “idealist understanding of logical form” ran deeper than Kant’s in recognising that Mind is essentially embodied and located, and therefore perspectival. Peirce’s understanding arguably dives deeper still in distributing across the space of reasons (and thus Being) not just Mind’s characteristic features of embodiedness and locatedness, but also its infinite corrigibility.